Report Structure

Each department's report consists of several sections and should help to give units a better idea of how their site is being used and by whom.

Daily Unique Visitors & Sessions

·         Unique visitors - unique machines visiting the site.  This is based on Google's trackers that try to identify the same machine on repeated visits.  While this is not 100% accurate, it gives a good idea of repeat visitors.

·         Sessions are a series of page views from the same visitor.  Sessions give a good idea of what a person does when they come to the site and how they use it.  A session ends when a user has been idle on the site for more than 30 minutes.  If they then continue on the site, it will count as a new session.

Site Traffic - Totals for the chosen period.  Sessions and Visitors are the same as above.  % New Sessions shows the amount of traffic that is from visitors that have not been to the site before.  The red or green numbers below the metrics shows the change in this number since the previous period to the time range you've chosen.

User Interaction - This data shows how a user interacts with your site once they visit.  The red or green numbers below the metrics shows the change in this number since the previous period to the time range you've chosen.

·         Avg Session Duration - During the chosen period, how much time does a visitor spend visiting pages on the site in a session.

·         Avg Time on Page - How much time does a person spend viewing a page before moving to the next one?  The last page of a session will not be measured, and if a visitor views only one page, there will be no record.

·         Bounce Rate - A Bounce is a Session that only has one page view.  This number shows the percentage of sessions that are only one page.

·         Pages/Session - The average number of page views in each session

Views by Site Section - Percentage of the pageviews that occur in each of the sections of the site over the chosen period

Top Search Terms - These are the terms visitors searched for before coming to your site.  This is a good indication of what people are looking when they come to your site.  If you see terms NOT listed here that you would expect it could mean you need to highlight those terms in your pages more to increase their rank in search results.

Your Audience

·         Audience Location - Geographically where did the user come to us from?  Local is defined as any traffic coming from Champaign, Urbana, or Savoy.  All other traffic is considered Off Campus

·         Devices - What kind of computer did the user use when visiting the site

·         Acquisition Channel - This is based on where the user came from before visiting the site.  

• Organic Search - Search engine such as Google, Bing, or others

• Direct - The user typed the url directly into the browser

• Referral - The user clicked a link on some other site to come to our site

• Social - The user clicked a link on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or others.

·         Country - The country the user's traffic originated from.

Most Viewed News Stories - Shows the most popular news content on the site in the chosen period.  You can choose to sort the list either by Unique (unique users that looked at the story) or Views (total views including if a visitor returned to the story)

Where is your audience entering your site? - A landing page is the first page the visitors to your site land on when they start a session.  The counts here are for how many sessions started on the indicated page.  We have broken this data down into several sets based on how the user discovered your site.

• All Traffic Landing Pages - This give data for all traffic arriving to your site.
• Search Engine Landing Pages - These are the pages people arriving from a search engine land on.  Common search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. with Google being the most common by far.  Search Engine traffic usually accounts for well over 60% of the traffic coming to the site.  Look at your Acquisition Channel chart to see what the mix is on your site.
• Direct Link Landing Pages - When users type in an address on your site, use a bookmark, or click on a link in an email they are counted as coming direct to your site.

Local/Off Campus Traffic - There are two sections with metrics similar to the ones mentioned above but limited to either Local or Off Campus traffic (as defined above).  Noting the differences between these two data can help you better understand the behavior of current staff and students versus others.  The red or green numbers below the metrics shows the change in this number since the previous period to the time range you've chosen.  Some data that is new in this section.

·         Most Viewed Pages - Similar to Most Viewed News Stories, but this listing shows the most popular pages across the entire site.

·         Top 5 Countries/States/Cities - This data is logically from Off Campus traffic only and shows the locations that generate the most page views.